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Book Review: My Great Predecessors Part V by Garry Kasparov

This abominable series is almost worthless because there are hundreds of factual errors and the games are full of useless analysis. Ego-maniac Kasparov says: “I discovered this move which has been unknown for fifty years,” or forty, or thirty, etc. His “great” discovery is crap, leading to a “quicker” win – four moves quicker! He writes such crap again and again, but considering how poorly researched this series is there is no reason to believe his move was not published somewhere a long time ago.

The atrocious translation of Ken Neat: “Korchnoi won against Gipslis literally by a miracle.” Someone call the Pope!! (More moronic translation from “Half a Century of Chess” by Botvinnik: “The reader will probably have noticed that the same position repeated itself three times, but at that time the rule in force was of a three-fold series of moves. Therefore my partner could not claim a draw.” That is NONSENSE, and only an idiot writes “three-fold”.)

Kasparov is a damn liar: “The semifinal Candidates Match in 1971 between Korchnoi and Petrosian was uncommonly tough, viscous and unspectacular. One win by Petrosian and nine draws.”

The match was phoney because the USSR Chess Federation ordered Korchnoi to lose. That is a matter of published record. What does that moron, Ken Neat, think “viscous” means? Kasparov also lies when he pretends to not know that Korchnoi was forced to lose the final Candidates Match to Karpov in 1974.

Kasparov is irresponsible and negligent in not stating that Korchnoi said around 1961, “My goal was to go from the opening to the endgame without a middle-game. I decided this was wrong and decided to play longer games.” If you don’t know that then you don’t know anything about his style of play.

He then played closed games, which are interminably dull. I don’t play over most of them. Oddly, he was a great player with the Tarrasch Defense to the Ruy Lopez: 1 PK4 PK4; 2 NKB3 NQB3; 3 BN5 PQR3; 4 BR4 NB3; 5 0-0 NxP.

His decision to play closed games came from his intuition. Because of the limitations and the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents, that gave him the best chance to succeed. A plow horse can’t be a race horse, like Fischer.

Kasparov makes a bad book even worse and wastes many pages trying to prove that Karpov would have defeated Fischer if they had played a match in 1975. That is impossible as Karpov is hopelessly weak against attacks by knights. That is why he persistently lost to Kasparov and that’s why Fischer would have won.